Slides for DMU Education Research seminar on Covid-19 and the idea of the University. Abstract available at: http://www.richard-hall.org/2020/10/27/slides-for-covid-19-and-the-idea-of-the-university/

1. Covid-19 and the idea of the
University: intellectual work at the
end of The End of History
Richard Hall ¦ @hallymk1 ¦ rhall1@dmu.ac.uk ¦ richard-hall.org

3. Categorical critique: explanation at a level that cuts through (i.e.
intersects) the differences in professional experience, to find what
is common among us.
The hopelessness of labour: to mistake the manifestations for the
cause of our problems breeds helplessness and hopelessness.
An intersectional synthesis: connecting contemporary Marxism with
the literature of feminisms, (de)colonialities, identities.
What is to be done? How do we get ourselves out of this mess?

4. bell hooks Audre Lorde
Angela Davis Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Sara Motta Sarah Amsler
Vanessa Andreotti Joyce Canaan
Linda Tuhiwai Smith Eve Tuck Eli Meyerhoff
Nancy Fraser Fred Moten
Nick Dyer-Witheford Karl Marx
John Holloway Raya Dunayevskaya Gargi Bhattachariyya
Krystian Szadkowski Joss Winn

5. Subjectivity is shaped by University structures that reveal its
shifting forms (TANs), cultures that appear as pathologies
(CASHAs), and activities recalibrated as methodologies.
mediations act as cover for managerialism that refuses and
alienates the humanity of intellectual work, because the meaning
of the University is generated through a desire for value, realised
as surplus or profit.
This value is anti-human and is predicated upon an idea of
University work that can be validated through individual, subject-
based and institutional performance management.

9. • Commodification of time and activity for-value;
• increased workloads;
• demands for knowledge exchange, research impact and
commercialisation;
• internationalisation strategies aimed at opening up new markets;
• casualisation and precarious employment;
• intersectional inequalities in promotion and tenure;
• attacks on pensions and wages;
• demands for more innovation in (online) teaching; and
• the sanctity of data and algorithmic control in setting strategies.

10. The platform University
• desire for enriched monitoring or tracking of performance;
• data flows reveal networks or ecosystems of external actors;
• flows of data enable new quantifications of University work for
profit or rent;
• fusing new technologies and technocratic modes of organising
work creates new forces and relations of production; and
• fusing technologies, flows of data and quantification,
behavioural science and algorithmic governance reinforces
white, colonial and patriarchal hegemonic norms.

11. flexploitation amplified through the crisis: academic work made
precarious and entrepreneurial.
crises of capital, in the form of underconsumption (e.g. of
courses), overproduction (e.g. of PhD graduates) or falling rate
of profit (e.g. weak net cash inflow for investment), shape the
symbolism of the University.
Debt, debt covenants and surpluses.
This is an institution seemingly shaped only in relation to crisis.

14. Covid-XX illustrates our difficulty in escaping the
symbolic power of capitalist social relations and the
gravitational pull of the universe of value.
Yet, it reveals the return of History.

15. Hysteresis:
competition drives institutions at the core of HE sectors to
accumulate or compensate for lost income at the expense of
institutions at the periphery already over-leveraged against specific
student or debt markets;
over-leveraged institutions then work to replace more expensive
university labourers with those who are cheaper, and to deploy
more technology;
For University workers, the result is further anxiety in an age of
heightened uncertainty and risk, a fugitive existence, or cynicism
about the academic project.

17. Amplified by Covid
Cultures revealed as pathologies of overwork, self-harm and self-
sacrifice.
Activities of teaching, learning, research and administration that
describe methodologies for control and performance management.
Inside these forms, the pathological and methodological content of
the institution is internalised by the University worker and their ego-
identity, thereby diminishing the potential for mutuality.

18. Differential levels of proletarianisation militate against common ground between
University workers or struggles for humane work.
These include: struggles over course closures; graduate student wildcat strikes;
protests against debt and cops on campus; struggles for decolonization;
movements against sexual violence on campuses.
Yet the University is still painted as a liberal institution that simply needs reform,
rather than transformation or abolition.
The search for status damages mutuality in the academic peloton/anxiety machine.

19. At The End of History, the University is emblematic of the
collapse in the symbolic power of humans to reimagine the
world.
Yet we are at the end of The End of History.

20. Hopelessness:
• the inability of the University to address crises other than in
relation to value;
• capital structures and disciplines the labour of love inside the
University, negating its humane possibilities, and as a result
breeds despair, depression and melancholy [Weltschmerz] as a
space beyond anxiety;
• increasingly, those who work inside universities have either to
become self-exploiting or self-harming or to deploy enough
cognitive dissonance to overcome the lack of authentic hope
that another world might be possible.

21. hopelessness has a layered complexity linked to an inability to
consider future positives, such that a negative miasma or contagion
generates vulnerability.
Inside highly competitive environments, vulnerability also tends to
shape a deeper relationship between defeat, entrapment and
depression.
A systemic treatment of hopelessness places the individual, her
environment and her society into asymmetrical relationship, rather
than focusing upon the individual’s learned helplessness or
psychological deficits.

22. At the end of The End of History, the hopeless University is a flag bearer for a
collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable.
• How are we to centre meaningful responses to the re-emergence of
History, beyond unilaterally declaring business-as-usual in the face of
Covid-XX, or noting a climate emergency whilst remaining implicated in the
consumption of fossil fuels, or whatever?
• When the abstracted power of capital has revealed its annihilation of
systems of life and living, how do University workers widen the horizon of
possibility beyond algorithmic solutions to insoluble, structural and
systemic positions?

23. We are entangled.
In respecting the unity of our difference, we can ask ‘the only
scientific question that remains to us…: how the fuck do we get out of
this mess?’ (Holloway 2010: 919).
• How do we know our work? (singular, particular, universal)
• Can we forgive the University? (essence, appearance, existence)
• Can we hospice the University? (a new quality of life)
• Can we compost how we feel about our work and lives? (negation
of the negation)

24. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.